Samis 1845

Benjamin Samis was born in 1779 in Huntington, Long Island, into a family long established in Connecticut and on Long Island. Descended from English settlers who arrived in New England about 1640, the Samis family had been substantial landholders for generations, rooted in a stable coastal farming society.

That stability was disrupted by the American Revolution. Loyal to the Crown, the family found themselves on the losing side of the conflict, and Benjamin’s father, Ebenezer Samis, accepted a Crown land grant in Upper Canada. Benjamin thus came of age within a Loyalist resettlement community shaped by displacement, yet sustained by landownership, kinship ties, and a determination to rebuild.

In Upper Canada, Benjamin married, raised a large family, and established himself as a farmer. In 1845, widowed and sixty-five years old, he undertook one final migration to Burlington Township in Kane County, Illinois. There he purchased affordable federal land and formed a multigenerational household, transforming Revolutionary exile into renewed stability on the Illinois frontier.